Fenrìr wrote:I mean, do people have the misconception that a mid expac raid tier needs to be easy like an entry level raid tier?

I'm assuming you didn't see the math bit I added to my last post. If indeed the early encounters were being balanced around a 498+ ilvl, you'd *need* to do *more than* T-14 to get the required gear levels.

That said, from the sounds of things, it's not the first boss that is really a gear issue - probably more likely that they got the internal difficulty curve a bit wonky between bosses.

I'll say a raid that has 496 ilevel is perfectly capable of killing post-nerf Horridon by the way. I know that for a fact as the guild I'm in on my lock alt (Nika's guild) 1 shot it easily this week after getting very close last reset pre-nerf (and would have killed it last week with a few more attempts), and that guild has an average ilevel of just under 500 at the moment.

So decide what the issue is, because post-nerf Horridon is perfectly doable with 496 ilevel, which anyone who raided HoF/ToES normal for a significant amount of time last tier should be close to, between being able to upgrade 496 pieces last patch, the neutral 522 neck.

Without a doubt Jin'Rokh is too easy, but I don't think after the nerf Horridon is particularly overtuned. I don't think having the first 5-6 bosses tuned around 496 ilevel is particularly outrageous.

The fact that Horridon/Council/Magaera all got nerfed must not be forgotten - they were tuned a bit tightly which had a big effect on a lot of guilds' week 1 progress, but the fights right now are pretty accessible.

benebarba wrote:let's say you have ilvl 496 in all your slots from farming the hell out of normal mode T-14. Your whole team has done the same. You all go grab your 522 neck at neutral, so your average ilvl is now, what 497/498? (+26 ilvl in 1 of 12 slots)? So you literally do not have the gear for at least 1/2 weeks (LFR lag of 1 week, so you can't earn rep) to go into the first boss at the intended level.

But that isn't the problem...if you're raid group was clearing the hell out of T14 normal modes, that means the mechanics should not be any issue and the gear can easily be overcome by that. 95% of the player base apparently wants to be 12/12 the first week...it's not possible. Even then, it was easily possible to get to friendly that first week...again, player responsibility which a guild in your scenario would have so they could have 2...maybe 3 upgrades by the time LFR opened.

However we're not talking about guilds at that point; we are talking about guilds that were not even clearing MSV, much less HoF or even know where ToES is...should not be complaining about the difficulty of ToT. It just doesn't compute. Your guild cannot handle mechanics so why are you trying? Sure, it's a game...everyone wants to see the end boss. I get that. That's why LFR does exist.

My raid team has an avg ilvl of 509...could we benefit from going back into HoF and ToES and actually doing the heroics we don't have for the gear? Absolutely; mostly because it's skewed by two people having close to 520 ilvl (I think the majority of us are around the lower end of 500). There have been a few fights where gear has been an issue due to a mechanic failure or three...but once those mechanics were mastered, the boss went down decently well, even if enrage was right around the corner.

Flex wrote:Normal mode raiding should not be balanced around having to do the LFR version of that raid.

It's not.

I think locking the VP gear behind SPA rep comes close to that for slowly progressing guilds.

I am on a backwater server, EU bottom 20 or something like that in terms of raid progression. Probably only a dozen guilds finished T14 on my server. I think for slowly progressing guilds like mine and those on my server, they often progress by outgearing the content, thanks to valor gear.

In the past, I tend to progress through raids already wearing gear about equal to what it drops. That will require LFR this time round.

It's not a big deal, because running LFR is something slowly progressing guilds will do anyway. But I do find the gating of VP gear behind SPA rep irritating. Partly because I'm finding 5.2 LFR much more irritating than 5.0. Partly because I have this fear I will be valor capped with nothing worth spending it on, given how slowly rep rises from LFR alone. Partly because the initial SPA gear is so insipid. A necklace? Double avoidance bracers? Sidegrade trinkets? Meh.

let's say you have ilvl 496 in all your slots from farming the hell out of normal mode T-14. Your whole team has done the same. You all go grab your 522 neck at neutral, so your average ilvl is now, what 497/498? (+26 ilvl in 1 of 12 slots)? So you literally do not have the gear for at least 1/2 weeks (LFR lag of 1 week, so you can't earn rep) to go into the first boss at the intended level.

SLight nitpick. If you actually farmed the hell out of Normal Mode T14 prior to the patch going in, the area a person would be at would be well over 496, unless they simply forgot the Upgrade vendor existed at all.

Even if your guild can't kill Horridon, between trash and Jin'rokh, which would be more than accessible in 496 gear (you'd maybe actually see the 4th pool at that point) would get you to Friendly. I think you vastly overestimate what it takes to kill Jin'rokh.

As far as the tuning of this tier goes, it really just feels like how previous tiers were, excepting that previous tiers tended to have something like 4 or 5 gimmes, while Throne of Thunder cuts that down a little. In ICC, the entire first wing was designed to be a gimme. In DS and Firelands, literally half or more bosses were made to be gimmes.

This expansion (and T15 in particular) simply cuts down on gimmes and makes those gimmes actually have a couple of mechanics. Jin'Rokh is one, but even he will require your raid to actually handle Fissures properly. Stone Guards was a gimme, but even there you had to handle taunts properly. That's slightly different to where you pretty much lolshot Marrowgar or Beasts or Shannox or Morchok with basically no idea of what was going on because even when you did the mechanics wrong, you still won with half your raid alive.

Rhiannon wrote:Thing is first boss is a joke to a raid with an average ilevel of 496.I'll say a raid that has 496 ilevel is perfectly capable of killing post-nerf Horridon by the way. I know that for a fact as the guild I'm in on my lock alt (Nika's guild)...

To you.

You are not average.

You guys are in the elite "real raiders" class. We're not talking about you here. We're talking about average people here, that are stuck on Garalon at best, and Elegon at worst.

What are we supposed to do? What is "our" content? We could (and probably should) keep going in T14 normal, but why? Why bother, when the new LFR has better stuff? We'll end up disenchanting every single drop here in a couple weeks!

(No, LFR is not "content". LFR is mindless once-a-week work you put in to try to get upgrades for real raid night.)

Or should we all just quit, as we're in a middle "dead zone" that there is no content for? Too good for LFR, and too bad for "real raiding".

Fenrìr wrote:However we're not talking about guilds at that point; we are talking about guilds that were not even clearing MSV, much less HoF or even know where ToES is...should not be complaining about the difficulty of ToT. It just doesn't compute. Your guild cannot handle mechanics so why are you trying?

Gee, thanks. Quit it is.

For the record, I'm not complaining about the difficulty of ToT. I'm complaining about ToT LFR dropping higher ilvl stuff than T14 normal, and that there's no reason for even doing T14 any longer. Well, no reason related to "progression", at least.

Fenrìr wrote:However, if you want to raid end game, IE: T15...then you should complete T14 (not LFR)...that's where you're gonna get the most beneficial gear to get past these walls.

Did I miss something and 496 is now larger than 502?

Fenrìr wrote:If you want to be in a normal mode raid group, you probably need to bite the bullet and app to a slightly better guild than the one you're in.

Absolutely not. The guild is RL friends (and friends-of-friends) that I rarely/never get to see in real life because they're between 150 and 3000 miles away. I certainly could get in with a higher "normal mode" guild, but if I really wanted to play stuff with strangers I'd go back to playing chess competitively.

halabar wrote:You in my raid team?.. (my group also has a lot of new raiders)

Heh. Actually, we don't have any/many new raiders - a lot of the group's been together since ICC at least. We're just ... average. Not elite, or even "very good". People here make all kinds of assumptions about DPS numbers and stuff which are just way too high.

We had a horrific time on Stone Guards. The people here don't seem to realize that DPS-ing on the move is a rather advanced skill - when Amethyst and Cobalt were up, we had people doing 25k that do like 65k on Feng. We were "doing the mechanics correctly" - get out of pools, away from mines, swap dogs (mostly correctly) and never had a problem with Jasper Chains. Just didn't have the DPS with all the movement. *shrug*

Having that as the first boss of the expansion was kind of off-putting, and rather demoralizing. Progression after that seemed reasonable (though Spirit Kings was way too easy). Should get Elegon this week or next, which would also be reasonable. Just frustrating to get better stuff doing stupid-ass LFR than current (to us) normal modes.

Most people want the wealth produced by a society with limited government distributed to them more generously by bigger government.

Well, I don't know that Nika would describe her raid team as elite, but anyway. And frankly, if a guild that raids 6 hours a week and had to cancel maybe 1/3 of their raids last tier can manage to clear normal, I'd say normal's tuned pretty well. At a certain point there has to be an incentive for people to actually try to get better.

Heh. Actually, we don't have any/many new raiders - a lot of the group's been together since ICC at least. We're just ... average. Not elite, or even "very good". People here make all kinds of assumptions about DPS numbers and stuff which are just way too high.

We had a horrific time on Stone Guards. The people here don't seem to realize that DPS-ing on the move is a rather advanced skill - when Amethyst and Cobalt were up, we had people doing 25k that do like 65k on Feng. We were "doing the mechanics correctly" - get out of pools, away from mines, swap dogs (mostly correctly) and never had a problem with Jasper Chains. Just didn't have the DPS with all the movement. *shrug*

Unfortunately, that's not "average" either.

There is a basic minimum, and it's not set very high. Dealing damage on the move isn't an advanced skill - for most it's just "Hit this button while moving". For several classes now, it's no change at all because they're allowed to do everything on the move.

At some point, there is the cutoff where people below the cutoff simply have to learn how to push buttons, because if their numbers are lower than the 50k or whatever required, they're simply not. Blizzard's tuning doesn't expect perfect play in dps numbers, but there is a lower bound. Jin'Rokh himself is doable if the people in your raid would be capable of doing roughly 65-70k in a stand still (because you get a 40% damage buff for most of the fight). That is really not very high - to give you an idea, it's a slight step up from the requirements for Gara'jal on Normal mode.

For those of us above average, Jin'rokh presents a kill on the second pool. There are 4.

Rhiannon wrote:Well, I don't know that Nika would describe her raid team as elite, but anyway. And frankly, if a guild that raids 6 hours a week and had to cancel maybe 1/3 of their raids last tier can manage to clear normal, I'd say normal's tuned pretty well. At a certain point there has to be an incentive for people to actually try to get better.

So much of THIS.

Seriously.

We raid 6 hours a week, of which a ton of raids were cancelled in the months we did T14. We were lucky to complete normal mode (and a few gimpy heroics) before 5.2.

TBH, with comments like "T14 normal is too hard", I'm surprised you players didn't die off with Cata's release version of heroic dungeons. It seems to me those suckers were harder than T14 normal.

Nikachelle wrote:TBH, with comments like "T14 normal is too hard", I'm surprised you players didn't die off with Cata's release version of heroic dungeons.

My guild did. It only came back together when they started to nerf Firelands. I am sure there was a lot of RL stuff, but the difficulty probably was a factor. I'm not saying they were too hard - I loved those 5 mans. But Blizzard said they were too hard, as so many players thought so.

I'm not saying tier 14 was too hard either, but perhaps they could have nerfed Elegon and Garalon sooner, and a bit harder. Blizzard have pretty much admitted as much, saying they want fewer dps checks in normal raids.

One thing to understand is that each player is just one person and can only do so much for the team. You can have individuals who are WoL ranked healers, tanks and dps but if you have a clump of others who significantly underperform or worse, never turn up in numbers to raid, then you are stuck. It's a simple matter of maths - WoL tells you the dps required to kill a boss and if you haven't got it, you wont kill it whatever your raid's mastery of mechanics. I guess you could server transfer - maybe that defines the non-casual raider; one who would leave friends to progress.

Jabari wrote:For the record, I'm not complaining about the difficulty of ToT. I'm complaining about ToT LFR dropping higher ilvl stuff than T14 normal, and that there's no reason for even doing T14 any longer. Well, no reason related to "progression", at least

As someone who has just killed Garalon (and has friends stuck on Elegon), I am in a similar position to what you describe for the "average". But I disagree with what you say in the quote above. It's essential ToT LFR drop better stuff than T14 otherwise the whole questionable experience would become an exercism in masochism. LFR is a big deal for slowly progressing guilds - both for gear and for something to do when you don't have enough signups or whenever.

As for ToT LFR making tier 14 redundant, it's only about a 16% chance to drop loot per boss. I got three pieces on my main and alt this week - all 502 necks, yay! A big upgrade on my 522 VP necks, sigh. ToT LFR seems horribly time inefficient atm. Horrendous queues, partial clears, healers quitting and keeping you waiting for tens of minutes for replacements, buffs stacking to 4 for a boss kill. I'm feel I'm mainly doing it for the SPA rep atm.

By contrast, breaking through to TES is a big priority for my guild as that will greatly supplement our gear. We only raid 1 night and HoF seems rather a slog for less reward, so will skip it as soon as we can. 496 weapons, trinkets, normal tier rather than LFR tier should make a big difference.

We're adopting a four pronged approach to gearing up for Horridon: (1) ToT LFR; (2) T14 10N; (3) SPA VP gear; (4) Jin Rokh 522 drops. Skip anyone of those and you will be slowing down your pogression somewhat.

I'm not saying tier 14 was too hard either, but perhaps they could have nerfed Elegon and Garalon sooner, and a bit harder. Blizzard have pretty much admitted as much, saying they want fewer dps checks in normal raids.

They nerfed Garalon within a week to add a minute to his Berserk timer on all modes A lot of people never even really saw the unnerfed form.

Rhiannon wrote:Well, I don't know that Nika would describe her raid team as elite, but anyway. And frankly, if a guild that raids 6 hours a week and had to cancel maybe 1/3 of their raids last tier can manage to clear normal, I'd say normal's tuned pretty well. At a certain point there has to be an incentive for people to actually try to get better.

So much of THIS.

Seriously.

We raid 6 hours a week, of which a ton of raids were cancelled in the months we did T14. We were lucky to complete normal mode (and a few gimpy heroics) before 5.2.

TBH, with comments like "T14 normal is too hard", I'm surprised you players didn't die off with Cata's release version of heroic dungeons. It seems to me those suckers were harder than T14 normal.

I just have to comment.Amount of hours raiding and amount of cancellations say nothing of skill, just about how easy or hard it has been to find time.

Rule of Thumb - people reading MT are above average. People actually participating will be a step above that. Now each person does not a raidgroup make of course, but please people, don't try to make out that the crowd posting here is "average" - most of us are quite a few steps above that, and those of us that get stuck, usually get stuck due to calendar problems (for us or the raid group) or becaue of other issues that preclude being in a guild of equally skilled people.

My guild got stuck, and dismantled at 5/6 MSV and 2/6 HoF - because we lsot a good group of our previously core raiders going in to MoP - Cata we were 11/12 (or was it 10/11) FL hc before DS came out, DS was also quite a lo of heroics till we finally said "enough raiding tis expansion" - so we never cleared DS heroic, but had we gone on we would have had it cleared (barring fatigue).That raid group was very good. Losing half of it (and key positions like 1 tank gone, me switching to DPS due to scheduling problems, and basically all outr healers) meant we had to bring in new people - not an easy task on an OLD server - its quite populous, but a significant portion are not young anymore, and have too many RL things going on to commit to a raid schedule (and yes a lot of the young ones were weaned on wrath or cata).I remember TBC and I liked the difficulty. I liked the slow progression, and noone minded that we only killed Vashj once - we even got to kill Archi pre-nerf.

All that trambling and I'm not quite sure what point I was building to) - but lets just keep focused - we are not average, and if we find the difficulty "just right", its overtuned (at least slightly). If we find it slightly difficult it will seem like a brick wall to average players.

As to the "can easily do it wit ilvl 496" - yes, most of us here can do that - most of us here can probably do it in lower ilvl gear - but when we add in all the others in a raidgroup - be it 10 or 25 man - the everage skill level will drop for most of us, meaning more gear. I don't care that I can pump out enough dps in ilvl 470 gear to down elegon, when only one other dps in my raidgroup can do the same, and we are both beating the better geard dps - that means its an (ilvl+skill)/2 problem, and the only realistic way to upgrade is ilvl, then tuning around a specific ilvl becomes a problem - especially when that average ilvl has been stated to be higher than the previous tiers max ilvl for normal modes.

Blue statement is that you need an ilvl of 500 to get past boss X (I haven't stepped foot in ToT even in lfr yet, so I'm not up to scratch on what boss it is and it really doesn't matter), meaning that its been desighned to block you at boss 1 to x-1 for however many weeks it takes for the average group to get geared up beyond ilvl 500.LFR just became progression instead of catch-up. Its not the ilvl in LFR that makes it progression, its the tuning of normal modes to require gear that the LFR provides, for average raidgroups to be able to progress.

Does it include anything that improves performance (willfully including consumables farming/rep dailies)?Or just each and every group content that can improve performance? From Heroics to LFR 14 to Normal 14 and LFR 15 to Normal 15 to Heroic 15?Or is it the path with the least steps to the current end of the game (Ra-Den)? From Heroics to Normal 14 to Normal 15 to Heroic 15?

Of course LFR and rep grinds will help progress, in the same way that enchant/gems/flasks will help, but does that make them progress?

Case in point - I was in a very similar position to Nika, with 4 Sha kills and 4 heroics bosses. We're now at 6/12 Normal, even after switching from 2 10-men to one 25-man for this tier.It is *very* possible to be late to the party and spring into T15 once T14 is completed, even without using LFR T15/Shao-pan rep. It won't be *easy*, it won't be *optimal*, but definitly possible.

Now, moving from there to something Nooska mentionned back then, another, way bigger issue is the return of guild poaching - you can't really jump-start a new raider into T15 as fast as you could in T9/10/12/13. So this means a decently-geared player from a struggling guild is a very tempting target for guilds looking to replace lost members.

When that day comes, seek all the light and wonder of this world, and fight.

Nooska wrote:I just have to comment.Amount of hours raiding and amount of cancellations say nothing of skill, just about how easy or hard it has been to find time.

Rule of Thumb - people reading MT are above average. People actually participating will be a step above that. Now each person does not a raidgroup make of course, but please people, don't try to make out that the crowd posting here is "average" - most of us are quite a few steps above that, and those of us that get stuck, usually get stuck due to calendar problems (for us or the raid group) or becaue of other issues that preclude being in a guild of equally skilled people.

This is not entirely relevant. Yes, members of our raid group visit maintankadin and read up stuff on how to do well. But that doesn't mean everyone we raid with does. And it doesn't automatically mean people who read here actually do well when they play - the fact that we're having this discussion demonstrates that.

When you talk about "average" groups, what is the sample? All guilds, including the ones who don't intend to do any organised raiding? All guilds that raid regularly in an organised group?

What do people think Blizz should balance raids around? The "average" of the self-selected group of active raiders that they already balance for, or the "average" WoW player overall, with the idea that any player regardless of experience should be able to wander into a raid and progress just as fast as others?

It's obviously pretty difficult to define what the average guild is. Looking at wow progress for T14 the average guild achieved 6/6MSV and 3/6HoF.

I still think there's a gap between LFR and what's on offer for guild groups that want something more organized than lfr. Perhaps though these guilds are happy with continued progression through T14. I'm really only basing my arguments/assertions off of a few cases known to me from my own server where a perceived lack of progression has led them to stop raiding, something which i don't think is positive for the game.

I think Blizzard need to approach getting more people raiding from more than 1 angle, especially as their current fix doesn't really feel very mmo when you can queue solo and complete without any communication.

In the TBC days we were more than happy if we got one new boss down a week. Now self-confessed mediocre players are upset if they can't kill the end bosses of a tier or are wiping a bit on a raid that is 2 weeks old.

Puuhhh-lease.

We used to have laughably easy normal modes and then a big spike in difficulty for hard modes making the step up very difficult. It also meant that those who were happy just doing normal had very unsatisfying content because they had difficulty motivating the group to try the "real" raiding because not many care to do the same fights but with one new add/debuff and a bit more damage.

I don't play the game so I might way off but to me this seems like a good thing.

The definition for "average" and "casual" isn't one we're all going to agree on, but that's not even the real problem here. The problem is that some people, regardless of classifications/titles/whatever, are having problems progressing past a certain point.

Where I agree: Having the stopgap being the second boss in the instance for some people, especially after the ease of the first boss, is a little rough. People WANT to see the new content, they want to feel it's accessible, and (this is the real distinction that some people seem to be missing) they want to be able to experience this with their team/friends. These people don't see LFR as "their" option, they see it as beneath them as their definition of a hard core raider would.

Let's be completely honest here: Jin'Rokh is a tease. He makes the instance seem like it's no harder than Stone Guards or Protectors. Just like a good book sets the tone in the hook, so too does a first boss set people's expectations for a raid zone. Sure, the boss is easy, that leads people to expect the next boss will be a wee bit harder, and not a swift kick to their sensitive areas.

Where I disagree: People throwing around random ilevels as a necessary gear level. No. It's not. There is absolutely nothing stopping people from playing their class/role better to surpass these encounters with weaker gear. While I do agree that having Horridon be the stopgap--and that Horridon can indeed be challenging because of the mechanics--is infuriating if you're expecting access to gear to fix this for you then you're looking in the wrong direction for your success. I'd be more inclined to agree with this on Megaera, but not Horridon.

I see quite a few people who believe the only way to make the content more accessible is to bring the content down to a lower relative degree of ease but not enough people looking for ways to bring themselves and their team to the level of the content. I see comments where people are struggling with early MSV bosses and feel they're coordinated, that people are properly gemmed/enchanted and prepared - but where's the accountability? Could the problem be your raid leaders aren't clearly defining what they want from you or changing their tactics to work for your team? (One of the biggest causes of this I saw when raiding in Friends/Family guilds were Raid Leaders copying a cookie cutter strat that just does not work for your composition, or themselves misunderstanding mechanics/making bad calls.) Could it be that you have certain people holding you back that just don't want to improve and only show up to get lewtz/out of a sense of responsibility/boredom?

There's ONE way Blizzard can bring the content to you: by retuning it to make it easier.

There are MANY more ways for you to bring yourselves to the content.

At the risk of sounding apologetic, I do agree that Horridon is unjustly difficult for people at my definition of a casual/friends&family level, but that in no way makes him impossible. The amount of coordination it requires (DPS check made more difficult by focus/priority target switching, interrupts, movement, quick switches to different mechanics, and to a lesser degree urgency/anxiety) makes the boss a steep change in difficulty over Jin'Rokh (tauntswap, drop the lightning ball outside of raid, stack for heals, repeat 3-4 times and win). The expectation is that you should progress through all the normal mode bosses quickly, and that's where the real flaw lays. It is not reasonable to expect Blizzard to bring content down in line with an unquantifiable level of casual/average, but it is far more reasonable to expect the level of average/casual to rise to the content level Blizzard has delivered.

tl;dr: If you can't dunk the ball the answer isn't to lower the hoop, it's to work on your jump.

Jabari wrote:For the record, I'm not complaining about the difficulty of ToT. I'm complaining about ToT LFR dropping higher ilvl stuff than T14 normal, and that there's no reason for even doing T14 any longer. Well, no reason related to "progression", at least

As someone who has just killed Garalon (and has friends stuck on Elegon), I am in a similar position to what you describe for the "average". But I disagree with what you say in the quote above. It's essential ToT LFR drop better stuff than T14 otherwise the whole questionable experience would become an exercism in masochism. LFR is a big deal for slowly progressing guilds - both for gear and for something to do when you don't have enough signups or whenever.

We're adopting a four pronged approach to gearing up for Horridon: (1) ToT LFR; (2) T14 10N; (3) SPA VP gear; (4) Jin Rokh 522 drops. Skip anyone of those and you will be slowing down your pogression somewhat.

This. And the challenge for anyone in a more casual guild is getting everyone to put in that effort.

Amirya wrote:... because everyone needs a Catagonskin rug.

twinkfist wrote:i feel bad for the Mogu...having to deal with alcoholic bears.

Pet theory of mine: guilds have face a somewhat easier barrier in Ds and maybe before. Along the way, some people joined guilds, people that never faced the walls many among is have had. Also, some among us mayhave changed a bit, due to responsibilties or tastes.

End result, when the brutal climb of MoP came, guilds weren't ready, and it's now we realise exactly how things had lapsed.

Opinions?

When that day comes, seek all the light and wonder of this world, and fight.